Measurement of Importance of 11 Sustainability Criteria based on Indirect Stated Preference Approach and Comparison among Four Asian Countries

Tomohiro Tasaki

National Institute for Environmental Studies

Tomohiro TASAKI, Ph.D., head of the Sustainable Material Cycle Systems Section at the National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES) and a visiting professor at the University of Tokyo, Japan. His academic background includes bothsystems engineering and policy science. His work is mainly focused on the 3Rs (reduce, reuse and recycle) of waste and environmental product policy as well as circular economy. He has been applying the methodologies of material flow analysis and policy comparison to evaluate and design recycling policy toward circular economy.

Abstract

In the development of a country, what aspect is more important than another? The concept of “sustainable development” puts importance on sustainability of a society as an important aspect, and Daly (1990) presented three... [ view full abstract ]

In the development of a country, what aspect is more important than another? The concept of “sustainable development” puts importance on sustainability of a society as an important aspect, and Daly (1990) presented three operational criteria for sustainable development focusing on the sustainability of the environment: those relating to (1) renewable resources, (2) non-renewable resources, and (3) pollutants. But what are the criteria for the other pillars of sustainable development, namely those for economic and social? For instance, “safety” must be one of the important criteria. But to what degree? Does its importance change as a country develops? We may assume that criteria important for developed countries are different from those of developing countries; however, the evidence is limited. In this study, we therefore attempted to identify criteria for sustainable development of a country and measure the importance of these criteria for countries in different stages of development.

Firstly, we reviewed previous studies in the field of sustainable development and selected 11 criteria: accessibility, capability, convenience, efficiency, environmental capacity, diversity and choice, inclusiveness, resilience and stability, security, self-sufficiency, and social justice. Secondly, we devised an indirect stated preference approach for the measurement of their importance because it seemed difficult for ordinary people to answer the importance of the 11 criteria directly. We prepared 59 questions in six fields (health, energy, economy, nature, education, and food) so that each question directly and exclusively links to one of the 11 criteria, and asked respondents the importance of each of the 59 questions with the 10-point Likert scale (from very important to not important at all) and their future importance with the 3-point Likert scale (become more important (+1), importance will not change (0), become less important (-1)). Then we calculated the average importance of each question linked to the same criteria. Respondents were monitors of survey companies and aged 20 or more from four countries: Japan, South Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam. The number of respondents for each country was 500 except for Japan whose number was 1408. Quota sampling was applied for each country with eight equal quotas of the combinations of two sexes and ages of 20s, 30s, 40s, and over 50. We plotted every criteria of the four countries using their importance as the vertical axis and their change in the future as the horizontal axis. In the results, the plots were positioned approximately in a 45-degree line in the graph, meaning that the respondents of the four Asian countries perceived that current important criteria would become more important in the future. Thai and Vietnamese respondents tended to think the importance was higher than Korean and Japanese respondents in general. Among the 11 criteria, security, efficiency, accessibility, capability, and environmental capacities were perceived as relatively important by respondents of all the four countries; however, the order of the importance differed by country. For instance, environmental capacity became lower ranked and inclusiveness became higher ranked as GDP of the country increases.